egafd.com

A bedtime story on how we get our information fed to us.

The Daily Mail has a story that councils could save average households ?452 per household (reassuringly precise, eh) if they got their procurement sorted and they base their story on a press release provided by the Communities and Local Government Secretary, Eric "Who ate all the pies" Pickles, who bases the release on the work done by a private company (they're private so obviously they are far better than the public sector) called Opera Solutions who studied energy, mobile phones and legal services for three councils. Here is the Daily Mail story.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -year.html

A bloke in the Guardian downloaded the "cutting edge" work done by Opera Solutions and it was 6 pages long, not including the cover and consisted of a three line table looking at energy, mobile phones and legal services. Four of the six pages were an advert for Opera Solutions.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... n-goldacre

The bottom line is that Opera Solutions reckoned they could get a 20% reduction on mobile phone tariff (no workings out were provided as to how). This was then extrapolated by Pickles to cover the entire spend of councils (a quarter of which is on social care e.g. residential care, oaps at home). Try saving 20% on that Batman. And the Daily Mail picked up on it.

http://www.communities.gov.uk/news/corporate/1925280

Enough to drive me to drink, which is what I am going to do now.

Go carefully with your newspapers, ye hear me?

Cheers
D

Must concede I didn't read the links here in the minutiae of detail, but my (initial) interpretation is that the real villains here are 'Opera Solutions' and their back-of-a-fag-packet costings (doubtless commissioned at enormous expense following a - OJEU compliant - tendering exercise).

I'm sure DM journalists are - largely - amoral careerists with their eye on sensationalism, the main chance and breathtaking economy of effort, all under pressure from editors and/or owners to produce results under threat of a stalled career. But surely that's not news?

Mark you, I have a quiet conviction local authority service delivery should be more 'joined up' in order to realise economies of scale.

The thing I find interesting about this story is the way in which the Guardian writer catches the conversion of sloppy, inconsequential research to front page national newspaper via a local government minister's office that clearly is happy to transmit any rubbish they can get their hands on if it makes their point for them.

The "in depth " research on which the Mail headline is based is here

[ur]http://www.operasolutions.com/images/do ... gs_web.pdf[/url]

Beware of any consultancy that uses diagrams of cubes in it's marketing. It will all end in tears!

Cheers
D